Monday, March 19, 2007

Microsoft does a very good job of making sure that it's easy to get up and running building a program using their tools. Over time, this has shown itself to be both a strength and a weakness.

Skill, Education and BackgroundWith a Microsoft toolset, people with very little skill, education and background in software development and the internals of computers and computing can get started building programs. This is very powerful, and encourages businesses to innovate.

Unfortunately, this also means that people who have learned how to build programs using your tools may have very little skill, education and background in software development. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Tasks: Simple and ComplexIt can be easy to accomplish simple, common tasks. Want to build a form, connect the form fields to a database table and allow people to enter data? You can build that in Visual Studio while hardly touching a line of code.

On the other hand, sometimes when you want to go beyond the simple things to the complex things, there's very little support for you to do that. The tools, the technologies and the documentation focuses so strongly on ease of use, simple tasks and beginners that sometimes the "step up" is not only difficult for those beginners, but can be difficult even for experienced programmers, who have a hard time finding the resources and information they need.

RecencyI haven't used many of the Microsoft tools of late, so it's interesting to see that trend continue via 'Just another Blog's hiring experience.